Artist Talk: 5 – 7pm, Tuesday, November 18th, 2014
With David and Peter Bufano in Conversation with the Artists

Free and Open to the Public

The gallery is accessible to our viewers with disabilities.
If you have special needs, please contact us at gwazda@berkeley.edu

Composite image of work by the artists in “Four Choreographies” – Lisa Bufano, Cara Levine, Shari Paladino, and Sadie Wilcox.

Four Choreographies proposes a conversation between artists and audiences in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery’s spaces, one in which bodies matter – as evidence of lives lived in a world which exists both outside and inside the gallery, and as agent actors in narratives played out in sculptures, videos, spaces, and gestures. In four interrelated presentations, works by artists Lisa Bufano, Cara Levine, Shari Paladino, and Sadie Wilcox create spaces which shape a common conversation, raising questions about control and support, collaboration and independence, reliance and solitude. Each of the exhibiting artists’ work and personal perspective includes a relationship with ability and disability; however, the works also take as starting points grace, humor, memorial, and growth; as well as memory, care, and healing as a community concern.

Still from Lisa Bufano and Sonsheree Giles performing “One Breath is an Ocean for a Wooden Heart” in Zagreb, December, 2007.

Lisa Bufano’s work includes sculpture, performance, video, and installation and has frequently incorporated collaboration with other dancers, choreographers, videographers, musicians, scientists, engineers, and sculptors, notably AXIS Dance Company, Heidi Latsky Dance and the GIMP Project, and her dance partner, Sonsheree Giles. In this exhibition, both published and previously unpublished video works are on view, including the acclaimed performance ‘Five Open Mouths,’ presented at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, among others.

Cara Levine lives and works in the Bay Area with her dog, Pigeon. Her artwork spans writing, sculpture, performance, video, and installation, and plays with magic, humor, symbiosis, parallels, and mirroring. Cara is currently an artist in residence at Kala Institute, and has been a resident artist at Anderson Ranch as well as a resident of Segovia, Spain; Bangalore, India; and Kyoto, Japan. A CCA Teaching Fellow, Cara also teaches ceramics at Creative Growth Center in Oakland and holds a 500 RYT yoga teaching certificate. Her work has been shown at CCA’s Wattis Center for the Arts, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

Shari Paladino received her BA in Art Practice in 2014 from UC Berkeley. She lives and works in the Bay Area as an artist and designer. Presented as large-scale installations, her artworks exist at the intersection of social practice and sculptural work, with a focus on collaborative process. The artworks ‘Shabora’ and ‘Hippocampus,’ on view in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, include a two-year cycle of collaboration with the family of Cora Vivienne Bousquet as well as with Lynette Love and her circle of friends and family. Paladino’s works were created in collaboration with artist John Scott, technician Ray Lee, dancer Faye Gault Hirsh, and musicians Deborah Tien-Price and Elisabeth Courtin Lasnier.

Sadie Wilcox lives and works in the Bay Area, currently the artist in residence at Children’s Hospital of Oakland. Exploring the intersection between art, medicine, and society, Wilcox’s cross-disciplinary work incorporates multiple vantage points, including the first-hand perspective of the hospital patient and the clinical analysis proposed by medical professionals. The work on view in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, ‘Clean Sheets,’ was made in dialogue with Kari Blouin, a former nurse at the Burn and Trauma Unit at the University of Michigan Hospital, as a document of Wilcox’s recovery from a burn injury. Viewers are invited to lie on the cot in the gallery to view the video installation.

Amanda Eicher, Guest Curator of the exhibition, is an artist, educator, and curator living and working in the Bay Area. A graduate of UC Berkeley’s MFA program in 2010, she is the member of two collaborative groups, OPENrestaurant and The Citizens Laboratory, and has presented collaborative, solo, and curatorial projects examining art and the growth and structure of communities and systems in a diversity of settings, including the Berkeley Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California Art, SFMOMA, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, Southern Exposure, Hunter College, the Botkyrka Konsthall, and the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Working with a social practice class offered through UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department and the UC Futures Working Group, Eicher has curated one prior exhibition in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Fiat Lunch: A Student-Driven Vision for the Future of the Public University. She currently works with the media arts organization Art Forces to program events and local and international projects.

In addition to the Opening Reception, 4 – 7 pm, Wednesday, November 12th, 2014, please join us for the Artist Talk 5 – 7 pm, Tuesday, November 18th, 2014 at Worth Ryder Art Gallery. David and Peter Bufano will be speaking with the other artists in the exhibition about the relationship between their work and that of Lisa Bufano. Co-Sponsored by Disability Studies at UC Berkeley.